


to think that immortality meant never dying

by kamisado



Category: Homestuck
Genre: 5+1 Things, Blood, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Spoilers up to Game Over
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 17:44:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7542010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamisado/pseuds/kamisado
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deep down, you always thought your death would be Just, a final penitence for some unspoken sin. Not strong enough to win a strife, not cool enough to earn Bro’s respect, not brave enough to be a hero.</p>
<p>[five times dave was afraid to die, and one time he wasn't]</p>
            </blockquote>





	to think that immortality meant never dying

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from 'our lady of sorrows' by my chemical romance

The journals aren't there. You've been away for ten minutes max, talking to Davesprite on the roof and some asshole has snatched them from their pride of place on top of the toilet. The toilet that's, uh, somehow found its way into your room, with what looks like a towel pushed down it. That aside, you tell yourself this’ll be easy to fix, all you gotta do is snap yourself back five minutes or so and –

That’s when you see him. Or rather you see _you_ , from a different timeline where you tried to fix this shit already and got your throat slashed for the trouble. Still in the same red velvet suit you’re wearing now. Crows have gathered, ready to reap the spoils, bright beaks gleaming in the light. You feel sick.

Your first thought is _you can't let Jade see this._ The easiest thing to do would be to throw it - you - out of the window and let good ol’ LOHAC do the rest. _It's kinda like a Viking funeral_ , you think. _That's pretty cool._ You lift the body, it’s - you’re - lighter than you thought, and toss it fifteen stories into the lava below, turning away before the heat strips flesh from bone. _Easy enough._

As stand atop your bedroom’s newfound bathroom appliance, taking stock of your room, you realize there's something wet on your hands. You make the mistake of looking down. There's blood on your hands, bright and arterial and very much yours. You stare as it becomes tacky, your hands clammy with sweat. You stare as it dries in your nailbeds and crusts along your fingers in rust-coloured smears.

Ten minutes pass.

You stare.

*

You have _got_ to cool it on the time-travel front. It's all well and good being able to undo your mistakes but you just know you're paying the price for exploiting these powers now. You try to comfort yourself; these aren't you, at least they're not you _now_ but once upon a time they were, cocky and carefree. There are six bodies on the ground, maybe more, bleeding out. Some of them in pieces, some unrecognizable. All of them you.

It's been bad before, but never like this. You hunch over, and retch.

*

You can't bring yourself to do it. You trust Terezi, of course you do, but you see yourself lying there sleeping on the quest bed, chest rising and falling, helpless and small. Her encouragement feels like all kinds of manipulation and even though it’s well-meaning it leaves you feeling gross. She keeps talking about how great it would be to catch up to John, and finally harness your aspect properly and _shit, is it really that obvious?_

Part of you doesn't wanna die in those hideous green felt duds but most of you just feels kind of shaky and wrong, even if you desperately want to be considered an equal. Bro has made you into a fighter, a warrior, with violence in your hands before you could even speak. But it was always self-defense, never like this. If you do this, you're just as bad as him.

In the end it doesn't matter.

You don't care about never ascending to the stupid pajama-wearing God Tier if it means the poor doomed Dave in front of you gets that much longer to live. You don't have to get your own blood on your hands again.

Jack Noir does the dirty work for you, Jade lets you know later.

*

This time it's not time-travel that gets you into this mess. This time it's Jack-fuckin'-Noir and his Becquerel powers and poor unfortunate Jade who's just unwittingly unloaded a clip in your back. Usually the dead Dave pileup consists of other versions of you, time-travel hiccups and bad decisions made, your resident murdering asshole taking care of anyone outside the stable time loop.

You knew this had to happen. Having time as your aspect gives you all kinds of weird omniscience about yourself, so what’s about to happen is written in the goddamn stars as far as you’re concerned.

But there’s some small deep-down part of you that can’t force down the constant panicked mantra of _this is it, this is it._ This is the version of you that’s not _meant_ to die, the Alpha Dave, the one who’s meant to make all the right choices and get all the best outcomes. _All the other Daves thought that too,_ you suppose.

Either way, dying fucking _hurts_.

It winds up being fairly straightforward. Jade kisses you; you snap back into your body. Gentle tentative prods to your back reveal no bullet-holes in your flesh, just jagged holes and dried blood on your shirt. Jade hugs you tightly, you’re so, so grateful for her, and you desperately try to force the idea of her seeing you dead out of your mind. Funny how she always gets to see the dead Daves first-hand. And by funny, you mean, horrific in a way that still wracks you with guilt if you think about it too hard.

You hug her back, but you can’t hide how much you’re shaking from the relief.

In the dead of night, weeks later, you still feel the sickening surprise and white-hot stab of bullets in your back.

*

There’s something so undeniably _cool_ about the sound of a one-way mission to the Green Sun. Trouble is, you’re not entirely convinced ‘cool’ is something you should be aiming for these days. You don’t want Rose to take this mission on; you pretend it’s out of a sick sense of jealousy, and maybe it is, so you summon up the bravado to bombard her with all the reasons you should do it instead. You hate the idea of her taking this on by herself, all alone in the void of space, and the guilt would eat you alive if you knew about it and never tried to stop it. You never told her how important she was to you, so maybe doing this will pay her back for all times she’s had your back over Pesterchum.

You stand together on your respective quest tablets, staring at an enormous bomb poised to tear apart two universes.

At least this time you're not alone. You wish you felt heroic, proud, at least fucking _pleased_ that you’re finally reach the fabled God Tier, but you don’t. There’s a timer counting down, glowing numbers incongruous with the darkness of space and you push down the rising nausea, the crippling fear. _Is there any coming back from this?_ You think of Jade and John and Karkat and Terezi and all the people that are gonna miss you if this takes an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle and you don’t come back. You look at Rose; you see your own pallid terror reflected back at you. You wonder if she’s thinking the same thing.  

But at the last second, she smiles calmly.

The Green Sun rips your bodies apart in a white-hot nuclear blast. You are nothing but atoms scattered across space, returned to the stars.

*

Deep down, you always thought your death would be Just, a final penitence for some unspoken sin. Not strong enough to win a strife, not cool enough to earn Bro’s respect, not brave enough to be a hero.

Jack Noir and other-white-Jack take Jade’s corpse and you spring into action. Danger is an afterthought for you these days; instead pragmatism takes the fore. All you need to do is get Jade’s body, take it to Jane, force her to bring your friend back and then go make sure Karkat and the Mayor are okay. It all sounds so easy in your head.

All that time on the meteor’s made you cocky, you realize, standing on the top of the mountain. You’re not the hardened warrior your Bro always hoped you’d be. Jade is lying there, bleeding out on the questbed, body mangled from the force of a fucking building falling on her. No matter how evil she was in the end, she’d always been there for you in your darkest moments, kindness in her words and her smile. You suppose there’s some poetic contrivance here – she was always there to see your death, to cry over the multitude of dead Daves who made the wrong choices. Always there to grieve over you, even when you wouldn’t, you _couldn’t._

And now you’re here with her.

Your hands grip around your sword, ready to take on the world. These two adversaries have the power to shape worlds, bend reality, and you have a goddamn piece of metal and a reckless attitude. Gone is the paralyzing fear, the sickness, the guilt. You’ve gotta save Jade, because it’s on you to make sure nobody dies for real in this goddamn hellscape. You’re a fucking Knight of Time, the first offense and final defense.

Two swords: one to the heart, one to the gut.

In the back of your mind, you always knew it was going to end here, and end like this. All the God Tier omniscience in the universe and nothing could change how this ended. You fall onto Jade, shielding her with your body as you bleed out. Despite it all, you can’t help but feel as if you’ve failed.

You hope, you pray the others have had better luck. _And if not, maybe you’ll see them in a dream bubble someday._ You smile.

The almighty clock declares it a Heroic death.

 


End file.
